Biography for Gisela Decuzzi

Briefly about me

Hello, I'm Gise, I'm from Argentina and I'm starting my second career so far.

I'm very passionate about programming and continuous learning, specially when something is challenging :)

About my study

I'm a System's Engineer from Univerisad Tecnológica Nacional (FRBA) - Argentina I have finished on December 2010.

I have just Started Multi Medial Design in Escuela Da Vinci - Argentina, I'm in 1st year.

My interests

Obviously programming as number one, but also teaching (as number two) and a lot of hobbies: photography, image manipulation, video, sound (multi medial stuff)

My non-Smalltalk experiences so far

I work as a developer since 2008. I've done diferents kind of projects since evaluations from architectural framework till the classics abms and batch processing. I love programming but I also believe that it's very important to keep in touch with the users from the system and sometimes I wear the analysis hat and talk with clients also.

I'm very convinced that the best way to develop it's been agile and perform smart iteration showing the advance reached. Build something and then improve it (make it work, make it right, make it fast).

I'm also a teacher at Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (UNQ), currently I'm in: UI's subject. There we teach how to build a UI using specially OO technology and making special focus on the importance of a well designed code, specially on the UI components.

And an Assistant teachear at Universidad Tecnologica Nacional for System's design. In the past I was helping also in Programming paradigms (the subject where I learnt Smalltalk and then stayed as an assistant teacher for six years before switching to system's design).

My Smalltalk experiences so far

I learnt object oriented programming in the university using Dolphin, then I became an assistant teacher and started to use Squeak and finally we change it for Pharo. We use it to teach Object Oriented Programming (unit testing, collections managements, blocks, a little about traits, etc)

In 2010, with Guille Polito, Carla Griggio, Nico Passerini and Germán Leiva we built "LOOP - Learning Object Oriented Programming" in Pharo and started using it to teach in several universities like UTN, UNSAM, UNQ and also for OOP trainings for Siemens and Telecom Argentina. We won the 3rd prize on ESUG 2011.

In 2011 I contributed a little with DBXTalk (with Guille Polito and Santiago Bragagnolo) specially with the browser (Neptune).

I'm actually doing an internship in RMod group in Inria Research Center in Lille. I have started on 1st April and will finish on July 1. I'm working in Smart Suggesitions right now (a tool to offer suggestions depending in the context where you are and the selected code) and I plan to keep developing more tools to improve the developer experience.

Why am I interested in Smalltalk?

I think that Smalltalk it's the best language for learn real object oriented programming and I also love it because it's so simple and so easy to understand, developing a project using Smalltalk makes easy to represent ate a domain and it's as flexible as you will need. And also in Smalltalk my objects are alive :D